Sunday, June 10, 2012

HORESHEAD 4 (sketch) & NEVER PUT DESCARTES BEFORE DE HORSE (dreamku) by Roswila

NEVER PUT DESCARTES BEFORE DE HORSE

Descartes declared
“I think therefore I am”
then where am “I”
in those precious times when thought’s
drowned totally in the doing?

and what happens to “I”
when flooded with radical
waves of thought that
totally alter connecting paths
across the dunes of experience?

more important, who or what declares familiar
the “I” reborn from every drowning?

[two tanka and a two-liner on a dream of 6-9-12. This is what I’ve heard called a thinking dream. No kidding! It’s also day residue. I watched a “marathon” of T.V. shows with Stephen Hawking last night on the cosmos, God, origins of life, black holes, consciousness and brains, quantum mechanics, you name it. It was a wonder-filled well thought out soup, which I felt in awe of and occasionally prompted to argue with. (Out loud. With my T.V. screen. On subjects I know little or nothing about. It’s good I live alone.) Descartes’ famous quote was referenced at one point and I clearly continued that particular argument into my sleep. It's an intriguing quote, especially in light of all the (lay person's) reading I've been doing into neurobiology. (Most recently "Icognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman.) Even now, writing these notes, I find myself getting caught up in a conundrum. (Such as "I" being the awareness of the awareness of the world that is "amness." And what is that "amness" to begin with? And what does it arise from? And is the world of which the "amness" is spottily aware really knowable or stable? And how can the "I" answer these questions at all? And so on....) The title to this dreamku? I had come across that funny line in a UCSB student newspaper I read yesterday. It had a picture of Descartes above the first part, and of a horse over the second. So I was primed to do dream battle with Descartes before I even watched the T.V. shows. :-) Sketch above: “Horsehead 4” by Roswila; for a long time I've thought I actually do need to put the horse before Descartes -- take care of the pressing practical matters (to a large degree, let my body lead), and the philosophical searching will follow from that work. Oh, Hawking proclaimed in one of those T.V. shows that philosophy is dead. It must be wonderful to be so certain one has totally understood everything. Sorry, that last sentence is both sarcastic (I envy that certainty) and my true feeling.]

PLEASE NOTE that I never have nor do I now lay claim to having been the first to suggest writing about our dreams in the haiku form. In fact, the haijin (Haiku Masters of centuries ago) sometimes wrote haiku on dreams. But even more importantly, what I have been developing for several years now on this blog is not even truly haiku or tanka or monoku. The ways in which I have been using and experimenting with these forms makes the results more akin to kissing cousins of these small Eastern poetry forms. Therefore, I mostly use the term "dreamku" to distinguish what I do from those traditional forms. Click here for a more in-depth INTRODUCTION than follows below, including links to my THREE PART PRIMER on the basic (most haiku-like) dreamku form.

Also, the photo accompanying a daily dream poem or non-dream based poem is not necessarily meant to illustrate it, but to reflect some small, even slant aspect of the verse -- similar to Japanese haiga (illustrated haiku). I've also recently realized that although the dreamku (i.e. dream based poems) posted here tend not to have metaphor or simile, the accompanying photos almost always act as such.

To write a metaphor or simile into a dream scenario is something I rarely do. It can be confusing: did it really look like a hand, say, in the dream, or am I just being poetic to make my conscious point? As these dreamku act as a dream journal, my over-riding tendency is to try to stay close to the actual dream scenario itself. Admittedly making for a tendency to less "poetic" dreamku. Then why pay attention to any haiku, tanka, or monoku parameters at all when writing about my dreams? Because I find in even attempting to adhere to them I'm making choices that relieve my dream recall of a great deal of chatter so that I can get down to some important dream aspects. Here's a link to THE AREN'TS OF DREAMKU & ACCOMPANYING PHOTOS in which I go into some of the basic parameters for dreamku and the photos chosen to go with them (and with any non-dream based poems I post here, as well).

The archives in the sidebar hold years of the daily dreamku, tanka, monoku and photo posts I've made, grouped in one post by month. As I no longer post dreamku (or non-dream based poems) strictly daily, each post will appear below and then in the archives by the day on which it was posted.

There are many other sorts of posts here, not all dream-based. I indicate which are about or influenced by dreams. Some non-dream focused posts are book reviews, "regular" poems (some by other writers than myself), scifaiku, writing exercises, Tarot haiku, photos, haiga, and so on. However, most of those are in much older posts. There's a listing by month going back to early 2006 in the sidebar.

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About Me

Retired, I'm grateful to indulge in daily blogging, taking digital photos, writing poetry every day, and other creative efforts as the spirit grabs me. I also enjoy reading my poems and sometimes improvising on one of the musical instruments in my collection (e.g. didjeridu or kalimba), in our retirement community's regular Talent Shows. And I also occasionally play a role in one of
our radio plays, written by a resident,
and read on stage as if an actual radio show.

"Ganesh dances joyfully,
each step out of now into now again;
each footprint filling to overflowing with kindness.
Remover of Obstacles, clear me out of my own way;
teach me how to dance lightly through life,
how to spill over with love." -- prayer by Roswila

"The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else." -- e.e. cummings (poet & painter)

"There's a thin line between dreaming and waking... The line is not hard and fast. It's more like passing through a waterfall. Really it's just a two sided organic system; on the surface individual blades of grass, underneath it's an intertwined mass of roots we can barely comprehend." -- As explained on the T.V. series FALLING WATER

"You're only paranoid if you're wrong." -- quoted in a play by Steven Dietz

"Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth." -- Pema Chodron

"The past is not dead, it is not even past." -- William Faulkner

"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home." -- Twyla Tharp (dancer/choreographer)

"Wisdom begins in wonder." -- Socrates

"Before the light which all things give off dies in the heart it must be expressed." -- Basho (haiku Master)

“The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.” -- Alfred Adler

"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert" -- attributed to Arthur C. Clarke (author)

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard Feynman (physicist)